Starvation lake sl-1

by Bryan Gruley

  “Jesus,” I said, wheeling around to face her.

  She was standing now. “Jerk,” she said. “I could’ve worked on Bigfoot, but I spent the day chasing your stupid snowmobile, and now you kill that story, too? You’re so full of crap.”

  She had a point. And I could handle her calling me a jerk, but in my short career as an editor I’d never had a reporter throw something at me. I had no idea what to do. But I wasn’t about to fire her when the suits weren’t about to let me replace her. So I just said, “Calm down, Joanie.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down. Don’t tell me anything.”

  Tillie appeared in the doorway in her fur coat with the little mink claws dangling from the shoulders. “What’s going on back here?”

  I looked at Joanie. “You’re a loser,” she said.

  Tillie walked over, picked up the can, and dropped it in a wastebasket. “Can you children please clean this up? Good night.”

  Joanie and I sat in silence. I wanted to get up and tell her how unprofessional and immature she was. Her story was all guesswork. Maybe she’d guessed right. Or maybe not. But she was right-we couldn’t just ignore the damn snowmobile. The clock said 5:26. Son of a bitch, I thought.

  My eight-paragraph revision said merely that police were investigating the appearance of part of a snowmobile on the Walleye Lake shore. I left a single reference to Coach Blackburn, in the last paragraph:

  Police have yet to determine ownership of the snowmobile. They noted similarities to one owned by John D. “Jack” Blackburn, the legendary youth hockey coach who drowned in a snowmobile accident on March 13, 1988. However, that accident occurred on Starvation Lake. Neither his body nor the snowmobile were found.

  I printed it out and walked it over to Joanie. Her eyes flitted across the page. She tossed it on her desk. “Whatever,” she said.

  “Whatever?”

  “Put it in the paper. That’s your job, isn’t it?”

  “Joanie. Is the story accurate?”

  “So far as it goes, yes.”

  I went back to my desk. As the story disappeared from my screen, I felt Joanie standing behind me. I turned to see she was wearing her parka. “I’m going to make it even more accurate for Monday’s paper,” she said.

  “OK,” I said. I nodded at the wall. “You going to clean this up, too?”

  “Nope,” she said. I waited until she was gone to get the mop.

  When I walked into the smoky tunnel of Enright’s pub, Soupy was standing at his corner of the bar, in his denim coat and red cap, yelling at the bartender to turn up the jukebox. On the TV over the bar, a local weatherman was placing a turtle on a circular chart cut into pie pieces labeled snow, sleet, sun, clouds. Each night, the turtle would crawl dumbly to one of the pieces, and that would be his forecast. He got it right about as often as the weatherman.

  “Hold your horses,” said the bartender, Dave Lubienski. He rummaged behind the cash register for the TV remote. Loob was a quiet guy who spent mornings working as an assessor at Town Hall and afternoons building elaborate clocks and birdhouses that he sold to downstate tourists who overpaid. He also tended bar and played for Teddy Boynton’s team in the Midnight Hour Men’s League. “Mute button don’t work,” he said. He clicked the volume to zero, turned toward Soupy, and saw me. “Evening, Gus.”

  “Loob,” I said.

  Soupy turned and spread his arms wide, feigning surprise. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Trapezoid himself.” He’d been calling me Trap since we were nine, playing a tabletop hockey game I’d gotten for Christmas. Soupy had dubbed his goaltender “Tommy Trapezoid,” after the shape of the little metal figure. Because I was a goalie, he started calling me Trapezoid, too, Trap for short.

  Loob set a Blue Ribbon on the bar. The first icy swallow burned my throat. “Another day, another miracle,” I said.

  “The trusty Pilot, ” Soupy said. “Michigan’s finest mullet wrapper.” Our motto, printed each day for fifty-seven years beneath the masthead, was actually “Michigan’s Finest Bluegill Wrapper.” Soupy liked to switch the fish around, though. “Long day, Trap?”

  “Long day.” I gave him the two-minute version, skipping Boynton’s visit.

  “That Joanie’s a piece of work, eh?” he said. “Not much of a looker, though, is she?”

  “I tend not to assess my employees by the shapes of their asses.”

  “Of course, but Loob here, he might have issues, right, Loob?”

  Loob replied on cue. “You can drink them pretty, but you can’t drink them skinny.”

  “Yes, sir,” Soupy said, downing his beer with a flourish.

  There were no tables in Enright’s, just eight stools, the long, whiskey-colored bar, and an elbow rail along the length of the opposite wall. Above the rail hung a collage of photographs of boys in the blue-and-gold uniforms of the Hungry River Rats. There had once been some of me, but smart alecks kept defacing them, and the bar’s owner mercifully took them down. Our old coach smiled at the center of the display, just his face in black and white, the deep-set eyes, the knife-blade cheekbones, the silver hair combed straight back. “Jack Blackburn, 1934–1988,” read the inscription.

  At the other end of the bar hung a photograph of Soupy Campbell, then sixteen, leaping into the air with his hockey stick raised high and his mouth agape in a joyous whoop. It was the night we had beaten Paddock Pools of Detroit in the state quarterfinals. Late in the game, with the score tied at 2, Soupy had stolen the puck from a Paddock winger and weaved his way through the rest of the team until a single defender stood between him and the goalie. The goalie didn’t see Soupy’s shot until it was whizzing past his left ear into the net.

  Soupy left Starvation after our last year with the Rats to play on a scholarship for Northern Michigan University. I was at Michigan, but we made a point of seeing each other whenever Northern traveled to Ann Arbor for games. He dazzled them his first year, and in his sophomore season got drafted in the third round by the National Hockey League’s St. Louis Blues. He left Northern abruptly before his senior year and tried the minor pro leagues. He played in western Canada, Salt Lake City, Fort Wayne, finally Hershey, Pennsylvania. Every now and then he’d show a flash of the old brilliance, but mostly he played just well enough to hang on. There were rumors of drug and alcohol use on the hockey grapevine. He tore up a knee, dislocated a shoulder, got arrested in Erie, Pennsylvania, for riding through downtown atop a car naked and drunk in the middle of the night. He married a woman in Flint, had a daughter, got divorced. I asked him about it all a few times, and he grinned and said, “Ancient history, Trap. If I dwell on my screwups, I might remember how much fun they were and start repeating them.” He returned to Starvation around the time of Coach Blackburn’s accident and worked with his father at the marina. Now, with his father seven months dead, he owned it.

  “Tell me, Soup,” I said. “Isn’t it kind of inconvenient to park your truck here all day when the marina’s three blocks away?”

  “Hey, Mom,” he said. “I came in for one.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “One right after another.” He laughed and jabbed at my shoulder with his bottle. “Got a bug up your butt, Trap?”

  The day’s aggravation had me just irritated enough to want to extend it. “I hear you’ve got some legal trouble,” I said.

  “Trouble?” Soupy said. “Nah. Just some lawsuits.” Loob set fresh beers down. Soupy leaned closer to me. “Lawsuits are one of those real-world things, Trap. You’re in business, people sue your ass.”

  “Your old man have as many lawsuits?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Does the zoning board know?”

  “Know what?

  “About all this?”

  “All this?” Soupy tore off his cap and tossed it on the bar. “What this?”

  “The marina, Soup.”

  “The marina’s fine.”

  I wasn’t as worried about the town as I was about Soupy. He was no expert at selling or repair
ing boats, or at running a business, but he knew enough to keep himself in shoes and beer in Starvation Lake.

  “And if Boynton builds his marina?”

  “Fuck Boynton,” Soupy said. He turned to Loob. “I’ll be collecting a hundred bucks from his sorry ass tomorrow. Who’s your money on, Loob?”

  Loob smiled laconically. “Not Gus.”

  They meant the annual Starvation Lake Shoot-Out, to be held the next day before our league playoffs began. Shooters paid twenty dollars for five one-on-one chances to score on a volunteer goaltender. The proceeds bought practice jerseys for the youth teams. Coach Blackburn had started the Shoot-Out when we were kids. This year, I was the goalie, thanks to Soupy, who’d volunteered me. The shooter who scored the most goals won a wool hat embroidered as “The Stanley Cap.” But it was really about bragging rights and side bets. Soupy had won four of the last five Shoot-Outs. Boynton had won the other.

  “You can afford a hundred bucks?” I said.

  “If I know I’m going to win. Fuck Boynton and his fancy-ass marina.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Yeah, and fuck you, too, Trap. The zoning board is going to shoot Teddy boy down like a porcupine from a tree.”

  Soupy figured he had an edge. Two board members had been friends of his father. Another once worked at the marina.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But what if they do? What if Boynton walks away then and you tank, isn’t the town screwed?”

  “Is that what fuckface Teddy told you?” he said. I started to answer, but he waved me off. “I know, you can’t talk about what goes on inside the holy hallowed walls of the mullet wrapper. But I know Boynton and his fat-ass lawyer have been peddling those lawsuits. I’m not so dumb, Trap. You want my permission to put that shit in the paper? Is that it?”

  “I don’t need your permission, Soupy.”

  “Look,” he said. “The town will not be screwed.” He set his beer down. “Snow’s been iffy this year, so we haven’t rented out as many snowmobiles as I’d like. But I already got people coming for boats. I’ve been a little distracted with this Boynton stuff, but we’ll take care of that and everything’ll fall into place. Shit, Trap, you hate your job, why don’t you come over and we’ll run the place together? Hell, we used to just about run it.”

  “I don’t hate my job, Soupy.”

  “You remember the cat, Trap?”

  When we were fifteen, both working at the marina, we pooled our earnings to buy a used sixteen-foot catamaran. We took it out on breezy summer evenings after work. Soupy sat and handled the tiller. I buckled on a harness and stood on the pontoon behind him. When a stiff wind caught the sail, my pontoon would lift out of the water and I’d stand up, the bottoms of my feet crooked hard against the pontoon’s edge. I’d lean way back against the harness to keep the boat from flipping, my body nearly horizontal over the water rushing by, Soupy working the tiller, his hair flying, both of us laughing and yelling at the setting sun.

  “That was the ultimate, Trap. Better than hockey even.”

  I loved him like a brother, but he didn’t make it easy.

  “Will you be at the zoning board Monday?” I said.

  “Fucking-ay,” he said. He smiled and spread his arms wide. “Hey, man, look-the marina’s got to last at least through summer. I already ordered the softball shirts.”

  six

  I left Enright’s a little after eleven and walked along the river to the lake to clear my head of the smoke and alcohol. The wind whistled low through a birch stand at the far end of South Beach. Across the lake, dim lights of homes on the bluff made hazy silhouettes of the fishing shanties dotting the lake. I looked toward the darkness past Pelly’s Point, where Coach Blackburn had gone down.

  He had come to Starvation in 1970 from Canada, where he’d played hockey into his twenties and then had been a coach, first of little kids, then older ones, finally sixteen-to nineteen-year-olds, Canada’s best amateurs. He left Canada, he told us, because he couldn’t stand the cold anymore; he longed for warm summers. He said his brother-in-law, who was from Kalamazoo downstate, had told him Starvation was one of the prettiest lakes anywhere.

  He started a heating-and-cooling business and bought a cabin in the woods a few miles west of town. That first winter, he built a rink outside in the clearing next to his cabin. The town had plenty of backyard rinks, but none like Coach’s. He encircled his with slatted construction fence for dasher boards and made goal nets from two-by-fours and chicken wire. He lined up red and blue milk crates for team benches and erected a huge blackboard for keeping score. He made it known that all of Starvation Lake’s young skaters were welcome to come to “Make-Believe Gardens” to play hockey.

  On Saturday mornings in January and February, when it was so cold that our skate blades squeaked on the ice, there’d be ten, fifteen, twenty of us out there in helmets and hockey gloves, our Detroit Red Wing and Chicago Blackhawk and Toronto Maple Leaf jerseys pulled on tight over thermal underwear and flannels and wool sweaters. We’d stop at noon to wolf the sandwiches and cookies our mothers had packed. Coach would hand out push brooms and we’d line up across one end of the rink and sweep until the ice glistened in the sun. Then we’d play until dark, and sometimes after, if enough of the dads who’d come to collect us were willing to wait a while and shine their car headlights out over the ice. Sometimes five or six squeezed into a station wagon with Coach to drink beer and watch the last game of the day.

  Usually Coach was on the ice. He called penalties and broke up fights and tended to bloodied noses and bruised ankles. Every hour or so, he’d whistle play to a halt and gather us around. “Listen up, eh?” he’d say, and we’d mug at one another about his Canadian accent. He’d show us the best way to scoop a rolling puck off the boards, how to throw a hip to knock someone off his skates, why it was better to shoot low because the puck might glance off a leg or a stick and fool the goalie. While he coached, his fuzzy mutt, Pocket, sat on a milk crate watching, his head swiveling back and forth as the puck moved up and down the rink. Whenever somebody went near Blackburn, little Pocket would bark his nails-on-blackboard bark. He did a lot of barking.

  Originally, I had wanted to play forward, like the Detroit Red Wings’ great right wing, Gordie Howe. But my dad’s favorite Red Wing had been a goaltender named Roger Crozier. Like me, Crozier was small and feisty and Dad liked how sometimes he would flop to block a shot and then right himself by grabbing the crossbar over his head. After Dad died, I decided I would be a goalie, like Crozier. No one at Make-Believe Gardens objected; everyone out there wanted to score goals, not stop them. At first, I wasn’t much good at minding the net. Mostly I just flung my body in front of the puck, hoping it would hit me. Maybe my lack of ability looked like fearlessness, though, because Coach Blackburn noticed. One day after we’d played from morning till dark, I sat in a snowbank, exhausted, staring at the ice caked in my skate laces and rubbing my neck where a puck had left a welt the size of a half dollar. Coach crunched up next to me and said, “You’re all right, Gus. If I ever get to coach a team around here, you’re going to be my goalie.”

  That spring, after Make-Believe Gardens had melted away, Coach showed up at my house one morning with a pair of goalie’s leg pads, a goaltender’s stick, and another of his homemade nets. All that summer, he came over two or three times a week and shot tennis balls at me. He showed me how to kick my legs at a shot, how to cut down angles, how to gauge whether a breakaway skater would shoot or deke. And he told me again and again to avoid the temptation to be a goaltender like Crozier, who nearly always flopped to the ice to stop a shot, kicking his legs to each side in a butterfly fashion. Coach didn’t like floppers. He said goalies who flopped tended to give up goals over their shoulders. And young players liked to shoot high because it looked cooler than shooting low.

  “Floppers look fancy, eh?” Coach would say. “Up and down, up and down, the girls like that hotdog stuff, eh? But you might get a crick in your neck from watching tho
se pucks go flying past your ear. Your job isn’t to look good, it’s to stop the puck, and if you want to stop the puck, you got to be a stand-up goalie. Especially you, Gus, because you’re short, eh? You’re barely standing up even when you’re standing up.” He’d smile then and muss my hair. “The floppers lose control, Gus. You don’t see anybody else out there flopping around, do you? So stand up. Hold your ground. You can’t control what’s going on in front of you, but you can control what happens in your little corner of the world.”

  My mom started inviting him to stay for dinner. He fell in love with her Swiss steak and mashed potatoes. I wished he’d fall in love with Mom.

  Two years later, he was asked to coach the River Rats, Starvation’s travel squad, with five teams at different age levels. The Rats had consistently won their fair share against northern Michigan competition, but they’d never been able to skate with the powerhouses from Detroit-the Pipefitters, Evangelista Drywall, Capraro’s Pizza, Panorama Engineering. Year after year, a Rats team emerged victorious from the state regionals thinking they were the ones who would finally eliminate one of the Detroit squads, and each time, they got crushed. It wasn’t only that the Detroiters were bigger and faster, which they were. They just seemed to know something about hockey that we didn’t. When they stepped onto the ice before the game, none of them even looked at us warming up at the other end.

  Blackburn took over the Rats team for nine-and ten-year-olds. The way it worked, if he did well, he’d keep coaching that same group of boys as we rose through the older leagues. We had our first practice at the town’s semi-indoor rink. There was a roof and two sides, but the other two sides were open to the elements. The wind cutting through barely ruffled the slicked-back hair on Blackburn’s hatless head. He gathered us around him at center ice, standing still and straight as a goalpost while we fidgeted and tottered on our blades, our baggy jerseys drooping to our knees, our helmets like fishbowls on our heads. He knew most of us, of course, but he acted as if he’d never seen us before. “The Hungry River Rats, eh?” he said. “You don’t look so hungry to me. But we’ll get you there. We’ll do what we’ve got to do to reach the ultimate goal.” He paused. “There are goals”-he pointed at one of the nets-“and there are goals. I’m talking about the ultimate goal. Does anyone understand?”